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[Quote No.51420] Need Area: Mind > Learn
"[A true story - with a message: Luck is when preparation meets opportunity as in the story of the discovery of the antibiotic Penicillin.] Three thousand years before penicillin, moulds and fermented materials had been used to cure various skin infections, although without an understanding of how they actually worked. But it wasn't until the late 1800s that scientific studies of antibiotics began. French chemist Louis Pasteur, after discovering that infectious diseases are spread by bacteria, observed that mould inhibited the growth of anthrax (an infectious disease spread from animals to humans). British surgeon Joseph Lister noted that samples of urine contaminated with mould didn't allow bacteria to grow, but he was unable to identify the substance in the mould. French medical student Ernest Duchesne successfully tested a substance from mould that inhibited bacterial growth in animals, but died at an early age in 1912, never seeing the world's acceptance and use of his important discovery. After World War I [in 1928], Alexander Fleming was conducting an experiment with bacteria when a tear fell from his eye into a culture plate. He later noticed that a substance in his tear (which he named lysozyme) killed the bacteria, but was harmless to the body's white blood cells. Years later, Fleming was doing research on the flu when a similar coincidence occurred. While he was on holidays, a bit of mould had fallen into a discarded culture plate containing bacteria, forming a clear patch. When he returned he recognised this pattern from his previous experience with lysozyme. He concluded that the mould was producing an antibiotic substance and named the antibiotic penicillin, after the Penicillium mould that produced it. His discovery was an amazing piece of luck. If Fleming hadn't left a petri dish of bacteria on his bench when he went on holidays; if he had properly disinfected the dish; if the weather had been different from the ideal conditions for bacteria and mould growth in the laboratory; and especially if Fleming hadn't the experience to recognise the importance of the observation, penicillin may not have been discovered as an antibiotic. But Fleming couldn't extract the bacteria-killing substance, so he couldn't try it as a treatment for general infections. He moved on to other research - leaving Howard Florey and his team to pave the way for penicillin's use as a lifesaver more than a decade later [1939]. [Published reports credit Fleming as saying: 'One sometimes finds what one is not looking for. When I woke up just after dawn on Sept. 28, 1928, I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I guess that was exactly what I did.'] " - Dr Simon Torok
[http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/florey/story.htm ]
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